This site over the past few days shows the potential for abuse of any electronic forum. In my opinion, the site should be frozen, with only voting or commenting on posts allowed. Since the brainstorming session was supposed to have ended anyway...
A new site should be developed that provides a lot more protection against spamming ideas over and over. There is a lot that one can do with the concept of electronic karma (good actions, which is to say using the site responsibly, on the site give access to functionality, bad actions, electronic spamming, harassment, extreme vulgarity or disrespect, threats, place restrictions to functionality). Also, a more robust account set up. When flagging a post as duplicate / spam / inappropriate, require:
1. A link to another post that is the duplicate. A search form could be provided for this purpose, if it is a duplicate it should be searchable quickly, or a place to past a link could be provided.
2. A link to a few other duplicate posts by the same user in a short period of time to indicate spam.
3. The reason you feel something is inappropriate.
Also, consider breaking out duplicate / spam posting into a seperate section of the site, for instance, create a SPAM and a DUPLICATE category. People are complaining about openness when you remove posts. They have a point. Instead, move them into a seperate section that folks who enjoy that kind of thing can use and verify that yes their postings are still available, but those users who want to use the site as intended can not be harassed (too much... there is some level of harassment that cannot be avoided when attempting to deal with people who like to harasser and annoy others in a respectful manner) by it. It MAY (and I emphasize MAY) prevent some users from spamming posts. At the very least, they can longer claim that they are being censored. It may also clue some people in as to what spamming is and how rude it can be.
This seems like an excellent time to review the posts on how this site and this process in particular can be improved.
Comments (8)
Good point, I am sick of the trolls too!
The site is NOT perfect - but the last thing needed is for Storm Trooper censors to decide what can and cannot be posted.
Obviously some sort of index would be good so that people could vote and comment on an issue that has already been posted - but not at the hands of storm trooper censors.
The search function here seems good so it moght be possible to use that functionality to create an index that would be the first thing seen by viewers, before actually creating a totally new post.
I think allowing folks the ability to post what they want is good. However, the idea of a karma system is such that, if you have been identified as a spammer (via the Flag Spam tool, as I suggest above requiring references to other items to prove the spam and then a forum moderator reviews the reports to confirm that the person reporting abuse is not abusing the report spam functionality, the reported posts could be electronically checked to ensure they are from the same user for this case very easily), you get an amount of negative karma points. If you have less than 0 karma points, you cannot post new topics. This is the restricted functionality of the site because you have not been using it appropriately.
However, let's say the spammer saw the error of their ways and started voting for topics and posting comments. This is good usage of the site and they start gathering good karma points. At some point their good karma outweighs the bad and they go above 0, they are now able to post topics again.
If they post new ideas, instead of spamming, they continue to get good karma, and no issues. However, if they return to spamming, they will get flagged again and gather more bad karma. If they go below 0, again, their ability to post new ideas is restricted. Possibly for a second spamming instance they get more bad karma than the first offense.
I suppose you could say that my reference to forum moderators is your 'Sotrm Trooper', but if the entire process is open, then there shouldn't be a problem. The posted who got so flagged will be able to see their post, that 10 people flagged it as spam, referring to 4 other posts that the spammer made within 15 minutes of each other and on the same topic and that a moderator upheld the spam report, with a resultant loss of karma.
Would you consider that level of visibility into the process a 'Storm Trooper censor'?
Langer,
Who is censoring what from the American people?
Since this idea is in regards to this particular site, and this particular site is about the people providing ideas about government to the government, and people are the ones reporting on if they think posts are duplicate / spam / inappropriate, I'd suggest that nothing is being actually censored.
I flagged this as censorship because of the portion about the 'moderators' (for lack of a better term) removing duplicated postings, as some people may feel like it is. I disagree, but respect their thoughts on the matter.
This site has been rigged so that the posts asking for Obama to support transparency by providing his own birth certificate, health records and college records are not properly counted.
It is possible to review this site to find the most rquested ideas by scanning "Top Rated" posts.
According to the liars running this website the most requested item has NOT been Obama;s birth certificate.
(My email is ricardomigrant@aol.com)
The most duplicated / spammed item has been about Obama's Birth Certificate. Most of us who want the site to remain about new ideas have been dutifully flagging these 'new ideas' (which I think is a poor term for such posting) and the moderators have been dutifully removing the duplicate topics.
The most requested item is http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/2459-4049 currently with a positive vote count of 1005. And that is including 182 negative votes. The only way to get to a very high vote count for your issue is to have 1 'idea' on the subject, and have everyone who supports it vote it up.
Of course, that also means you would then get an accurate depiction of who doesn't agree with it, which is why I suspect that this hasn't been done on that particular subject.
If you have 100 'ideas' on the subject, and each one has 100 positive votes, you do not have a net result of 10,000 votes on the subject. You can only reliably say you have 100 votes on the subject. To see how many overall votes you have, you would need to cross-reference the individual voters, to eliminate duplicates.
If you want to make your point, find 1 idea on the subject, I'd suggest the one with the most net positive votes currently and point everyone who wants to support it to that one idea to vote it up. If you can get one idea on that subject to be the highest net positive rating, at that point you can say that it is the most requested.
It's kind of like doing a voice vote versus a counted vote. The folks who are posting duplicate ideas and spamming ideas on the same subject over and over are effectively trying to do a voice vote and screaming their loudest so that someone listening will say, 'they're the loudest, therefore that's what the most folks want!' Which is a bogus way to vote, and I hope anyone who believes in Democracy understands that. It is what I did when I studied 'parliamentary procedures' back in middle school and we tried doing voice votes in the class. I screamed my head off with everyone else to try to drown out the other side.
Um... yeah.
However, the individual ideas with the most numbers are the ones that actually have the support of the most people, because they count the individual votes, instead of just pandering to whomever has the loudest people yelling for them.
This website was not just poorly planned, it was barely planned.
It is probably the lowest bidder.
Please do not use this firm again.